


slanting parallel

by kakashifluff (hyliaslight)



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Developing Friendships, Fluff, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Reincarnation, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2020-12-20 17:31:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21060485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyliaslight/pseuds/kakashifluff
Summary: Once upon a time, I died. But that wasn’t the end. Not by a long shot. (SI)





	1. hiraeth: one

** _Hiraeth_ **

_Homesickness for a place or a time that you cannot return to._

chapter one

* * *

Once upon a time, I lived.

It was a peaceful life. I grew up in relative privilege in a world of convenience and technological advances, a world complicated and simple in equal measures. Politics will always exist in every world, after all, but there were also rules inherent to the world that couldn’t be broken. I was never a scientist—didn’t have the mental fortitude to stand equations and numbers for very long—but the laws of physics and lack of physics-breaking magic made things somewhat easy, or at least predictable.

More than peaceful, it was a good life. I had family and a few friends and very little personal tragedy.

I never appreciated it as much as I should have. Maybe we weren’t always the closest of families, but they were there, and they would always be there; even after graduating college, I knew that I would never have been left out in the cold to fend for myself entirely. I _was_ plenty close to my little sister, too, despite the hours of time difference between our chosen colleges.

Despite all this, despite the fact that I should have been happy and healthy and content with my life, I…wasn’t. I was lonely. I struggled to pay attention, to get my schoolwork done. I stayed locked up in my dorm room and I escaped into fictional worlds of magic and adventure. Even when I was at my worst—when I felt most empty and absent and when I hurt so much I wished my own existence away—those stories could make me smile. I loved them, and I lived.

And then I died.

It was not The End.

How I died isn’t really as important as the fact that I did. I do remember it, sort of, but I’ve never wanted to. It’s definitely the worst possible memory to keep from that life, because it was so sudden and painful and _unwanted_. It was the kind of death that I had always been most afraid of. I try not to think about it.

So I died, and then, instead of heaven or nothingness or whatever it was I’d thought I expected, I was born. I don’t remember a lot of the early days of my new life. I lost a lot of time, between my suddenly infant brain and the deep, aching feeling of being so, so _lost_. My new parents would tell me, years later, that I was a very gloomy baby, but that’s not exactly…well. From what I _can_ remember, it’s not wrong, but it’s also not entirely accurate.

I spent my waking hours alternately inconsolable and unresponsive. Infant bodies are not equipped to handle negative emotions in any way other than crying and screaming, and I had a lot of complicated, negative emotions to get through. I was grieving. I was out of sync, uncomfortable with my own body. When I wasn’t crying, I was just _blank_; staring at a single point and rarely reacting to anything my new parents did to get my attention. I never smiled, or laughed. It had to have worried them terribly.

At night, there were dreams. Terrible, awful, _familiar_ dreams, all featuring a life that I had lost far too early and appreciated far too late. Some were even echoes of nightmares from that life, down to the last hazily remembered detail. Dreams in which I couldn’t open my eyes to see my surroundings despite knowing deep down that it was home. Dreams that I could barely understand or remember come morning but left me with a hollow ache in my chest that even infantile amnesia could not let me forget.

Like there was a black hole where my heart should have been, tearing and sucking at the rest of me until there would be nothing left.

Some days it would seem like the pain was finally numbing, only for it to return with a vengeance at the smallest reminder. I felt out of sync with my own body because it wasn’t _mine_.It was bizarre and wrong and out of my control. I’d never been particularly graceful before, but young as I was, I had basically no coordination at all. My new parents attempted to cajole me into crawling, but I hadn’t had it in me to put in much effort. I didn’t think there was a point.

My first birthday came and went. I started losing less time, though I was no closer to being able to process the enormity of my experience in the same way as I would have in my old, adult body. Not, I suppose, that that would have meant much. I hadn’t dealt well with negative emotions very well even then.

Perhaps predictably, the nightmares got worse. I started to resist being put down for bed, fussed when the lights were turned off. The dark was too deep, too lonely. It hid shapes that seemed to move and watch me, as if they were waiting for something. I was, in a way I could never remember being _before_, afraid of it.

Something had to break. As it was, something _was_ breaking, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was me. All it took was one more nightmare. One more dream of being frozen in bed in my old body, in my old room, in the dark, staring at a shadowy figure leaning over me. One more night of calling out for my mother, my _first_ mother, who never came—no one came, not even my sister whose room had shared a wall with mine and who had been my closest confidante for the whole of that life. One hour or minute or second or _whatever_ it was of pure panic and desperation and such complete, utter loneliness in my own helplessness.

I woke up breathless in one moment, and in the next I was screaming. My mother, my new mother, ran into the room to check on me. My loud cries quieted into soft sobs as soon as she held me, murmuring soothing nonsense to me. Or at least it seemed like nonsense to me, as I hadn’t yet grasped the new language of my second life. I was too emotionally overwhelmed to parse more than my new name anyway: “Michiko-chan.”

My new father came into the room and whispered a question to her. I’m not sure if she replied, too busy snuggling into the comfort of her arms to pay attention. I was just so exhausted, so drained. I wanted to be held and comforted. And for once, that want, that _need_, overpowered all the grief and guilt and emptiness that had kept me from letting myself have that.

My parents stayed in the room with me as I drifted back into a much more peaceful sleep, tears still caught in my lashes. I realized that they loved me. They didn’t know me, my personality, but they loved me with a parental fierceness that would only evolve as I grew and they learned who I was and might be.

I think that, in a way, I already loved them back.

They took care of me, and they loved me, and they didn’t understand what was wrong with me but they were still trying. There was no way I would ever, in this life or my last, not love them for that.

I couldn’t turn off my grief. I couldn’t control my feelings, I couldn’t immediately work past the emptiness that so often took hold of me, and so it wouldn’t exactly be any _easier_ to adjust than it had been. But something had changed. Something had snapped in me, and if I couldn’t be who I was then all I wanted was to be the little girl I should be. The fresh start.

The next day I sat up and started paying attention.

* * *

Things weren’t automatically smooth sailing from there. Now that I actually cared, certain aspects of my reincarnation became even _more_ unpleasant, if that can be believed—diapers, for one, but more so the discomfort that stemmed from the disconnect between my mind and body.

The more I focused on learning how to move in my new, tiny, uncoordinated body, the stranger it felt. The more I stared at my own hands and feet, the more wrong they looked. I had known the sight and feel of my own body, and it didn’t match what I was seeing and feeling.

And the thing was, I was sure there was something _other_ about it besides its unfamiliar newness. I could feel something shifting inside me, but it wasn’t exactly a physical feeling. Like phantom pains, but not painful. Before, when I hadn’t bothered paying attention, it had just seemed like a persistent itch all over. What it really felt like, when examined, was…like the memory of water moving over my skin, of lightly resting my hand on a body of water to feel the surface tension, only somehow _inside_ just as much as out.

It was a sensation that made very little sense, to my frustration, and I was only frustrated more by my inability to communicate this feeling to my new parents.

As I focused more and more on that feeling, I began to feel a similar sort of intangible something—I supposed energy was the best term for it, at least before I was old enough to ask, although I was definitely tempted to call it magic—from other people. My mother’s felt warm and cool in equal measure, something like dappled sunshine and shade, while my father’s reminded me almost of sea foam. I didn’t understand how such clear sensations came across from something so intangible and nearly unnoticeable until I came close.

They changed too, sometimes. Not the basic sensation, but the best way to describe it would be to say that the energy moved, like light: bright and flaring sometimes, weak and subdued others, often flickering quickly or slowly. I thought it must be related to emotions somehow, because certain states of their energy often coincided with displaying particular feelings. A smile for a certain flare, surprise for a certain flicker.

I couldn’t tell exactly what they were feeling all the time. Sometimes I guessed wrong, even while trying to use their energy as a clue. It certainly wasn’t like mind-reading. But I still felt closer to them for being able to feel it. Sometimes when I closed my eyes, I thought I still saw their silhouettes glowing with soft blues and golds.

Continuing difficulties aside, my parents were obviously relieved to see me more responsive the rest of the time. They started taking me out of my room more and to different parts of the house, parts I wasn’t sure if I had ever actually been in before. The kitchen, the dining room, even the study. We had meals as a family, and they would set up a playpen of sorts in the study while they worked on the finances or whatever papers they were looking over so intently.

Now that I was actually listening, I heard a lot. I learned that my new mother’s name was Yuina, and my new father’s Souma. My father called my mother “Yui-chan” sometimes, but more often they used each other’s names without honorifics, or simply “anata.” They loved each other deeply, I could tell. It was something about how they were so comfortable around each other. It spoke of years of commitment.

(I recognized it because my _before_ parents had been like that.)

Time passed, much more bearably than ever before. I finally started to pick up some of the language, even if I didn’t really vocalize much yet. It was a strange dichotomy, where I at once struggled with something so foreign to me and yet seemed to be steadily catching up with where a child my age could normally be expected to be in terms of comprehension, if not speech itself. I still thought in English—not sure if that would ever go away, or even if I really wanted it to—but I guess it really is true that immersion is the best way to learn a new language.

Not that my efforts were particularly helped by my burgeoning tendency to get songs from my old life stuck in my head. I had only ever been average as a musician or singer, but I’d loved music all the same. It was bittersweet that I could still remember so many of them so well, even so long after I’d last heard or even thought of them. It was a little less bitter when either or both of my new parents started to recognize the little tunes I hummed and hummed along with me.

It wasn’t a bad life, I came to realize. It wasn’t my old one, and it never would be, but there were things to appreciate. Like my mother, who read me stories and gave every character their own voice. My father, who chased me around pretending to be a monster, tickling and throwing me into the air whenever he inevitably caught me. They made me giggle and laugh and I loved them for it.

I turned two years old, and my parents finally started taking me outside of our house.

* * *

Now that my parents felt comfortable enough to take me outside, my learning accelerated. This was in part due to my parents beginning to teach me things besides new words to add to my steadily growing vocabulary, and in part due to the tendency of adults to speak freely about things children have no concept of in earshot with the assumption that the children either are not paying attention, or do not care.

I’m not ashamed to say that this was probably when my habit of eavesdropping truly solidified. I had always listened more intently to my parents’ conversations than most babies probably did, once I actually engaged, but their conversation topics while I was around were not usually especially informative. Not that the mostly idle gossip of the customers who frequented my parents’ shop was all that much more informative. Apparently we lived in a small village, the kind where most people knew each other.

My parents’ shop was fascinating. Apparently they were metalworkers, the both of them, and they were well known for their variety of product. They sold jewelry, tools, and—this was the part that surprised me most—weapons. Decorative ones, yes, but also, and more so, ones that were clearly meant to be used.

It was becoming more and more apparent to me that this was not only not my old life, but likely not my old world. The realization set off a string of hard-to-decipher feelings within my chest. On the one hand, the differences sometimes made me remember with painful clarity the circumstances which led me to being in this world in the first place. On the other, however, it sometimes helped to have clear differences between my old life and my new one, so that I could remember to live this one on its own merits.

And then a team of ninja came into the shop.

I didn’t realize they were ninja right away. Though they dressed perhaps a bit more strangely than everyone else I’d met in my thus far short second life, it wasn’t really anything I hadn’t seen before, and I was quickly becoming used to the particular anachronisms and eclectic influences of the fashion in this world. There was one adult and three kids, young teenagers at the oldest. I didn’t bother to give them more than a passing glance until, sheepishly and with the glares of the others spurring him on, one of the kids inquired about the price and availability of kunai.

My head popped up at that, surprise leading me to drag my crayon across my drawing particularly violently, though I didn’t even take notice of the ruined work as my eyes locked into the group. Now that I was actually looking, I could see the bandages wrapped elbow to knuckle on the adult’s arms, the long sleeved mesh undershirts on two of the kids, the small packs strapped to each one’s hip and thigh, and....the strips of cloth tied around each forehead, with a metal plate attached to each one. A metal plate proudly engraved with a stylized leaf.

My mother—or Kaa-chan, now that I was capable of somewhat-clumsy speech—smiled at the boy and gave no indication that this was anything out of the ordinary. I watched, blown away, as the kid picked out a set of _dangerous knives_ and paid as much as he could, while the adult picked up the slack with a roll of his eyes. They both thanked my mother with respectful, shallow bows, the kid throwing in several words of mixed thanks and apologies to the exasperated adult as well, calling him _sensei_ the whole time.

“Let this be a lesson to you,” the adult said dryly. “One should always double check his pack before leaving on a mission.”

“_Triple_ check, even,” another kid chimed in.

“What kind of ninja forgets his weapons, of all things?” huffed the last. By this point, the first kid was bright red from mortification and clutching his brand new kunai set like it would whisk him away from the situation.

“Oh, you’d be surprised by how many ninja come in here looking to replace a weapon they’ve left behind,” Kaa-chan cut in genially. She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial faux-whisper. “Between you and me, they make up a significant portion of our customers.”

The kid gave her a weak smile, while the man’s energy flickered in amusement. I closed my eyes and really _felt_ it, because it was very different from any I’d felt before. Not just in sensation—it was like being in the same room as a lit fireplace—but also in sheer magnitude, as if he had so much more of the energy than anyone else I had ever met. The kids were the same, though still leagues away from their sensei.

I felt a murmur of surprise and interest, and when I opened my eyes said sensei was looking directly at me. Something about his energy went very, very quiet, though I could still feel it ever so faintly; it was so sudden and so _strange_ that I couldn’t help making a small noise of unease.

“Michiko-chan?” Kaa-chan asked, hurrying over to my side. “Is something wrong, Mi-chan?”

“Ah, sorry about that.” The man was suddenly next to us, though I hadn’t heard or seen him move. He sounded somewhat sheepish. “I probably surprised her.”

Kaa-chan looked confused. “How so?”

“I suppressed my chakra.” At the lack of change in Kaa-chan’s expression, his eyebrows raised. “Shimizu-san, do you or your husband hail from any of the Hidden Villages? Have a background in the spiritual?”

“No, not at all,” she shook her head.

The man’s eyebrows climbed higher, and he gave me a considering look. “Then your daughter seems to be a natural chakra sensor,” he said at last. “It’s unusual in children without shinobi relatives, but not entirely unheard of.”

That was about when my eyes glazed over and I completely checked out as my brain finally caught up to the logical conclusion of the entire event. Going through it in sequence:

1.) I could feel a seemingly-magical energy in myself and other people. This energy, apparently, was called chakra.

2.) There were self-professed ninja in my parents’ shop. Kaa-chan did not act like they were weird or in any way out of place.

3.) I recognized that stylized leaf on their forehead protectors. But what I recognized it from was my old life. From a television show I had watched in my old life. From _fiction_.

Somehow, I had been reborn into goddamn _Naruto_.

_Well_, I probably thought, a little hysterically. _I guess this might as well be happening._


	2. hiraeth: two

** _Hiraeth_ **

_Homesickness for a place or a time that you cannot return to._

chapter two

* * *

After realizing exactly what world I had been born into this second time around—seriously, _Naruto_, how on _earth_, but I supposed I could at least take some kind of comfort in the fact that it was still _somewhat_ familiar—I needed to…adjust.

I didn’t exactly withdraw from my parents, but for several weeks I did go through my life in a daze more often than not, distracted by memories of the anime I had gotten into not quite a year before my death and subsequent rebirth. What time period did I even live in? Not the Warring Clans Era, obviously, as shown by Konoha’s very existence. That was definitely a relief.

Eventually I grew used to the idea that this was my new world. None of it’s dangers had yet to reach me, and though I knew they were out there and often found myself restless with fears and worries regarding them, I knew that there wasn’t much reason for me to be. Kaa-chan and Tou-chan were civilians, provided an important service through their metalworking, and the most drama our town had seen in my few years of life was a love triangle between the grocer’s daughter, the baker’s apprentice, and the bookstore clerk.

(Although in my last life I had never expected myself to experience its pains and dangers either, despite their abundance, and then...well. I shouldn’t have been surprised when things changed.)

I was four years old for the second time when my parents sat me down and told me that we were going to be living somewhere else. When I asked why, they exchanged looks and then very gently explained to me that it was getting to be very dangerous here. We lived not too far from the border of the Land of Fire, and some very bad people were just too close for comfort. Kaa-chan and Tou-chan didn’t want any of us to get hurt, and so we were going to be moving to the safest place in the whole country: Konohagakure, the Village Hidden in Leaves.

This was the first I’d heard of any such danger from outside or in Fire Country, but even with my eavesdropping habit I knew my parents would do their best to keep their worries from me. It must have gotten very bad for them to decide to leave. They’d seemed to love our little town.

Strangely enough, I wasn’t frightened by the information, per se. I had already felt fear enough; suddenly I didn’t know how to feel about it at all. If I was interpreting this correctly, then that meant there was a war on the horizon. And because of the world I now lived in, it would be enormous and devastating. We were on the brink of one of the Shinobi World Wars…and living in an area with a high probability of being hit with the worst of it.

Yeah, if it were up to me I’d decide to move too.

I was quiet for a moment, swinging my legs back and forth under my chair. Then: “Are we gonna get ninja to take us there?”

Kaa-chan and Tou-chan both smiled. They seemed a bit relieved that I wasn’t questioning them further, or throwing a fit about leaving home. I did feel a bit sad about it; I’d always formed weirdly strong attachments to familiar locations. But I’d also lived a whole other life, in which I’d grown up in a completely different house, one which I sometimes still expected to see when I woke up in the morning. Leaving a place behind wasn’t anywhere near as bad as leaving the people.

I was four now, and my parents were all I knew in this world. The move didn’t really matter to me in comparison.

“Yes, Mi-chan, we’re hiring ninja to escort us to the village,” Kaa-chan said warmly.

I nodded distractedly. Konoha was…well. It was safe, if only for a given value of safe. Saf_er_, definitely.

It was also the center of just about every major problem that I knew of in the ambiguous future, but considering that I had a slightly more defined sense of where I was in time, those were likely a decade off at the very least, if not more. As a civilian child with two living parents and no particular goals in ninja-hood, I wouldn’t have to worry about Danzou, who was arguably the only internal threat.

And, admittedly, I was curious. It had been over four (strange, trying) years since I’d last been able to watch _Naruto_, but I’d been a definite fan, and this was _the_ Village Hidden in the Leaves. Theoretically aware of its dark side or not, I couldn’t help being almost excited to see the place that was so important to the story I had known. Even if it wasn’t just a story anymore.

With that last thought, my child-brain’s attention span failed me and I wandered off to color. Maybe later I would demand a story—I still struggled with reading even the simplest of the writing systems here, to my eternal dismay and frustration. For now, though, I had an urge to draw a nice outdoor scene. Some flowers, maybe. Or a tree.

Ah. A cherry blossom tree.

* * *

Over the next few weeks, things began to change. Most of it was organizing and packing in preparation for the move, both our house and the shop becoming more and more empty over time as belongings migrated into various bags and boxes. Before I knew it, those spaces felt strange and alien instead of the familiar home they had been, and I looked forward more than ever to going to Konoha at least so that we could make a home again.

However, the changes weren’t all material. Now that I knew about the looming war, whichever it may be, I could see what I did not before: the way that people hurried about their business a little more than before, how their conversations were quicker and quieter, the uneasy flickers in their chakra whenever shinobi passed through. It was a subtle change, but a clear one when you were looking for it. The whole town seemed to be slowly descending into a gloom, invisible anxieties creeping up at every corner.

Before, when all of this was just a story, I had never considered how shinobi conflicts would effect the civilians outside of the hidden villages. I didn’t much want to consider it now—I wasn’t really attached to anyone in this town aside from Kaa-chan and Tou-chan, but they were still familiar to me. They were people who were irrevocably linked to this part of my (second) childhood. I did not enjoy the thought of any of them or anyone being caught in the crosshairs of bullshit, over-powered ninja business.

A few days before we were set to leave, Kaa-chan and I tracked down all of my toys and books that had migrated outside of my room and piled them up on my bed to be packed away. “Alright, Mi-chan,” Kaa-chan said, putting her hands on her hips. “You can choose one toy and one book to bring with you on the trip. The rest will have to go in the boxes with everything else.”

I frowned at the limit, looking disappointedly at the book pile. I’d been told that the journey from town to Konoha would take several days, and while I still wasn’t as fast at reading here as I had been in another life and another language, I couldn’t imagine being interested in the same book for the entire trip.

I dug out a few specific books and sat before them, contemplating. Also, ignoring Kaa-chan’s stifled laughter, presumably at the seriousness of my expression. It _was_ a serious decision—once I made it, I couldn’t change my mind later!

The choices were quickly narrowed down to two adventure books. One had a princess in need of saving, and the other a tyrant in need of deposing. Both, ironically, were about ninja. I went back and forth between the two, comparing and contrasting, until at last Kaa-chan sighed.

“Two books, one toy?” I bargained.

“Deal,” she said. “I hope you won’t have as much trouble picking a toy.”

Of course not. I had a few dolls and plenty of doll accessories, thanks to my long-standing weakness for anything miniature, but if this trip was going to include overnighting anywhere then I wanted something I could sleep with. Therefore, I picked out my favorite stuffed animal, a soft gray plush cat that I called Kiri-tan. A callback to a similar toy I’d had in my _before_ life, named Misty after the family cat from that childhood.

An inside joke only I would ever understand.

We set my choices aside and stuffed everything else into the designated boxes. Seeing my room so impersonal was no worse than the rest of the house in the daytime, but then, I hadn’t had to sleep in the rest of the house at night.

My fear of the dark, finally abated slightly in the past year or so, returned with a vengeance. I spent that night frozen in some awful combination of future anxiety and current, illogical, childish terror. After that, I spent the last nights in the house tucked between my parents, focusing on the fizzy feeling of Tou-chan’s chakra on one side and the warm-cool of Kaa-chan’s on the other until they lulled me to sleep. There were still nightmares.

* * *

I stared up at the ninja before me in awe. Oh, I’d seen plenty of ninja before, spending as much time in the shop with Tou-chan or Kaa-chan as I did, which meant that I’d been desensitized to them despite myself. But this one was more than a little different.

“Hello there,” the man smiled down at me, tilting his head a little to the side. “My name is Namikaze Minato. My student and I will be escorting your family to Konoha.”

Namikaze Minato, the future Yellow Flash, future Hokage of Konohagakure, and a very, very tiny and _grumpy_ looking Hatake Kakashi. Also future Hokage. There were, honestly, no words. Except maybe—

“Your hair is so _bright_!” I blurted out, with no small amount of delight. Recalling the shade of his hair from a cartoon several years and some mild infantile amnesia down the line did nothing to prepare me for seeing it in reality. It really was so, well, ridiculously _yellow_. And gravity-defyingly spiky, how did that even work? In contrast, my own long hair was just barely the right shade and tone to be called pale blonde instead of outright white. “Brighter than mine!”

“So it is,” Minato said with a laugh, scratching the back of his head. My parents got a good chuckle out of it too, but I noticed tiny Kakashi giving me a skeptical look. He had to have been older than me, actually, but not by any more than a couple years.

I was struck with a sudden, strange worry that he would feel left out, so I added, “And yours looks very soft!”

His eyes widened a little, and I smiled beatifically at him while the adults tried to hide how that only made them laugh harder. “I’m Michiko! It’s nice to meet you,” I continued, looking at him expectantly. Minato hadn’t actually introduced him, after all.

“Hatake Kakashi,” he said shortly.

And nothing else.

“It’s nice to meet you, Kakashi-san!” I said again, now a little bit strained. I hated awkward silences.

“You already said that,” he snipped.

The smile still barely clinging to my lips faltered entirely and my cheeks went hot. “Yeah, well, you—you don’t have to be mean about it,” I blustered, ducking my head and just barely resisting the urge to stomp my foot. I couldn’t believe I’d thought he was a cute kid. He was a total _brat_.

“Kakashi-kun, be nice to Michiko-chan,” Minato chided his student. His chakra flickered in a sort of amused way, though. He had a lot more chakra than even the jounin-sensei I’d encountered before in the shop, and it reminded me of a sitting outside on a warm but breezy day. Kakashi’s, on the other hand, was crackling and staticky and warm, and also jerky with something I thought might be irritation. “She’s one of our clients and she was just being welcoming.”

Kakashi merely nodded in response and looked away. I humphed, squeezing Kiri-tan to my chest. With an almost sheepish laugh at the clear tension between the two of us, Minato clapped his hands and suggested we get moving. I stuck my tongue out at Kakashi behind his back as he turned and started marching in what must have been the direction of Konoha, then followed with the rest, sighing gustily.

This, I suspected, was going to be a very long journey.

...I ended up being both right and wrong about that.

At first, in defiance of my expectations, the time seemed to fly by. This was the first time that I had ever gone more than a few streets beyond home since _before_, something that hadn’t really occurred to me before since I had become content with my small, familiar world. I couldn’t stop myself from paying rapt attention to our surroundings as we walked, unaware of the soft looks on the adults’ faces as they watched me take in the outside world for, really, the first time.

The further inward in Fire Country we went, the greener everything became, and it was absolutely beautiful. I picked several wildflowers from the side of the road, at least one each time I saw a completely new type of blossom. Some of them ended up in my hair, some tucked behind Kaa-chan and Tou-chan’s ears. The warmth of the sun was tempered by the somewhat cooler air, spring still gracing the country, and the clouds that rolled across the sky were picturesquely fluffy. As I looked up at them, I was hit by a perhaps expected pang of melancholy. My _before_ dad and I had shared a habit of taking copious pictures of clouds like these.

I missed him still. Missed sharing those snapshots with him whenever scrounging up the effort to text or call or use words in general seemed impossible. And it had been a long time since I’d been reminded of that so starkly.

A gentle touch to the top of my head snapped me out of my daze. I realized that I had stopped walking while staring upwards, and that my vision had gone blurry with unshed tears, white clouds smearing against the blue blue sky. When I finally tore my eyes away from the sight, it was Tou-chan’s warm and caring gaze that they met. He was concerned, of course he was, but this was also not entirely unusual behavior from me. Though I had managed to become a happier and more..._childish_ child in recent years, there were still occasional moments when everything just hit me all over again.

I scrubbed the tears away, gave a tremulous smile, and raised my arms in the universal gesture for _pick me up and cuddle me now_. Tou-chan obliged with a grin, just as I knew he would, swinging me up and throwing me high into the air in a way that made me burst into giggles with the adrenaline rush, before catching and settling me onto his hip.

I looked around us to find Kaa-chan shaking her head, lips quirking up at the corners, Minato projecting a smile that belied the slightly concerned shimmer in his chakra, and Kakashi staring at me with a sort of deadpan look. His chakra was difficult to read and I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely annoyed by me, or if it was a mask for how discomfited he might have felt at the brief and entirely unexplainable display of grief. It could have even been both. I’d probably never know for sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you everyone who left a comment or kudo! i hope you're all excited to be getting to konoha because i sure am

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to slanting parallel! this isn't entirely planned out so updates will likely be very slow, and please take note that the archive warnings will likely change in the future, especially as we get closer to Big Plot/Backstory Elements from canon. i hope you'll enjoy the ride!


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